The present invention relates to an image recognition device, a recording medium storing an image recognition program, and an image recognition method, which recognize a type of a display object appearing in an image.
In general, recognition of objects, letter strings, and others contained in an image is called image recognition. In particular, the image recognition that identifies a type of an object contained in an image on the basis of its shape, color, behavior or the like is called general object recognition.
In recent years, many studies have been conducted on the image recognition, including the general object recognition, and accurate image recognition has been pursued. However, no image recognition devices that can provide image recognition that identifies correctly and accurately an object in an image still have been realized.
Accordingly, various techniques for improving the accuracy of the image recognition have been developed.
To give an example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2010-9440 (publication date: Jan. 14, 2010) describes a recognition device that recognizes a letter string from image information and further modifies the obtained letter recognition result.
More specifically, the technique described in the document above first subjects a letter string contained in image information to image identification processing, and thereby estimates the respective candidate letters for letters making up the letter string. Then, the recognition device creates a candidate letter string, which is the candidate for the letter string, by combining the candidate letters. Finally, the recognition device identifies the letter string contained in the image information by checking the candidate letter string against words in word registration information.
According to the description of the document above, the recognition device can recognize letter strings through low-load processing.
To give another example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2000-11095 (publication date: Jan. 14, 2000) describes a method of modifying a letter recognition result. In this method, a letter string resulting from the reading of letters with an OCR is modified in reference to letter strings contained in a frequently-appearing word list. Specifically, the method first extracts a part of the OCR reading result as a sample, and then extracts, from this sample, a letter string which is similar to a prepared word registered in the frequently-appearing word list. Next, the method creates an erratum in which the extracted letter string is related to the prepared word, and finally modifies the OCR reading result by using this erratum.
Both of the techniques described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2010-9440 and Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2000-11095 recognize a letter string in an image, and modify the recognized result. However, no techniques have been disclosed so far, for recognizing any given display object within an image in addition to a letter string and modifying the recognized result. The present invention addresses the above disadvantage and an object thereof is to provide an image recognition device and the like which are capable of identifying accurately a type of a display object appearing in an image.